In the weeks before Hurricane Harvey, the GXP team had been working with Team Rubicon USA – a nonprofit that leverages the skills and expertise of military veterans to provide disaster relief – on a pilot evaluation and training exercise designed to add cloud-hosted GXP Xplorer®, GXP WebView®, and GXP OnScene solutions into its disaster response workflows. As the storm intensified, initial plans for a simple training activity were put on hold as GXP personnel engaged to bring application experts and a terabyte of relevant satellite and aerial imagery for detailed analysis.

“We knew the hurricane wasn’t going to wait, and we decided to take immediate action to help this extraordinary organization and its mission to assist the thousands of people affected by the storm,” said Jessica Hulsey, GXP product manager at BAE Systems.

For five days following landfall, employees worked alongside Team Rubicon at its National Operations Center in Dallas and various forward operating bases to provide response teams with imagery-based insights of the disaster area, including basic terrain analysis, flooding overlays to maps, identification of ground hazards, and route analyses to determine open roads between bases and central command.

“Leveraging GXP-hosted services allowed us to significantly accelerate the speed at which we were able to deliver imagery insights following Hurricane Harvey’s collision with the Texas coastline,” said Hulsey.

In addition, GXP operations personnel provided near round-the-clock support from remote offices in St. Louis, Missouri; Reston, Virginia; and San Diego, California.

When disaster strikes, every second counts; and GXP solutions continue to ensure that first responders have the intelligence they need, at the time when they need it.